Existing comment:
Samuel Arnold:
In the war's closing months, Sam Arnold -- an unemployed clerk -- was doing odd jobs on his brother's Maryland farm. It wasn't difficult for Booth to recruit Arnold, a former soldier in the Confederate army, in his kidnapping plan.
"I found Booth possessed of wonderful power in conversation and become perfectly infatuated with his social manners and bearing," Arnold would later recall.
By March 1865, however, Arnold was having second thoughts. Abandoning Washington, he got a job at Fortress Monroe, not far from Norfolk. That's where he was found on April 17 by detectives, aided by papers found in Booth's Washington hotel room. Arnold talked freely, implicating Dr. Mudd, who would later help to save Arnold's life during a yellow fever epidemic that swept the military prison in the Florida Keys, to which both men were condemned. Sam was pardoned and released in 1869. |